Transcript 

Brandon Carter: ​

Welcome to this month's rendition of gPanel Office Hours.

As always, we're going to do our introductions, but most of you probably know Mark and myself by now. We're going to go through a couple of new features and what's been added to the platform since our last webinar.

And then we're going to do a little bit of a deep dive into for today that topic will be delegation, which I think is pretty significant and one of the unique one of the better features of gPanel that people probably could take advantage of more frequently. And then of course, we will wrap up by taking whatever questions you all have here in the audience.

As I mentioned, my name is Brandon. I'm the Marketing Director at Promevo. Joining us as always is our resident gPanel guru, Mark, who is now in our Customer Engineering department.

So, those of you who are like signing up for gPanel, those of you who are onboarding into it, are probably going to get a personalized demo from him or someone on his team.

Mark Baquirin:

Absolutely.

Brandon Carter:

As always, I'd like to introduce ourselves. Who is Promevo? Promevo is a Google Premier sales, service, and build partner. That means pretty much everything underneath that Google Cloud umbrella, we help you manage.

We'll help you build, we'll help you customize. We provide support for it. That's including Google Workspace. That ChromeOS, all of your Chrome devices the Google Cloud platform. And lately, quite obviously, that includes Gemini, Gemini for Google Workspace and Gemini for GCP, Google's kind of holistic generative AI solution.

And as always, we have a number of partners that we work with, as you can see those down on the bottom right. And that's everything from onboarding and training, support. Cameyo helps you run pretty much any Windows or Mac or Linux app on Chromebooks. CloudM is a great migration partner, and QREW are our AppSheet partners.

I wanted to make one quick note before we talk any more about gPanel. So, I just mentioned Gemini and it's obviously a big important initiative for Google, but AI, clearly big topic today for those of you that are on this call and those of you that are watching in the future.

AI is in your organization, whether you know it or not, whether you are paying for your employees to have it or not, they're using Gemini for their personal purposes, like from their Gmail accounts, they're using ChatGPT they might be using Anthropic. Regardless, like it's in your organization, whether you've approved it or whether you're paying for it or not so it's a, it's at an inflection point now where AI is very quickly becoming one of these new normal things.

We're putting together a series of webinars between ourselves and Google Cloud experts to help you navigate this. And as you can see here, they're going to be a one per month over the course of four months.

This first one that's two weeks from today is going to be primarily centered around, what do you need to know about bringing AI into your business? Do you need regulations around it? What are the security risks? Should every employee have access to generative AI? What are the different tools that are out there? So looking at it from like an organizational management perspective.

In August, we're going to talk about using AI in your products and services.

September, we're going to go a little bit deeper into how do you regulate these tools now that you're in your organization? But also, like, how do you get people to adopt them? There's going to be employees that you might pay a good amount of money to give them access to these tools, but they may not understand how to use them, what's appropriate? So how do you activate employees to help them get the most out of their AI tools?

And then finally, in October, we're gonna bring out a couple of clients to sit down and talk through their real life scenarios about how they've enabled generative AI in their organization.

As always, you can go to promevo.com/webinars to sign up for those, and we're super excited about that and hope that you all are as well.

All right. So back to gPanel.

What is gPanel? Not everyone here is a gPanel client. Obviously, quite a few of you are snooping around it, maybe considering it.

But essentially, gPanel is our Google Workspace management and reporting tool that sits over the top of your organization and enables you to see pretty much everything that's happening within that organization.

You get deep reporting on things like shared files and user behavior. You can set up, like, decommissioning and onboarding automations to where if you know that you're going to be letting an employee go in 30 days, you can set what is essentially like a countdown clock and different things happen on different days. Role delegation and like Gmail delegation, which is a big one that we're gonna be talking about today. You can identify security risks.

It's like an omniscient power source for you to be able to have tighter control and visibility into everything that's happening in your organization.

So, now that I've been rambling for a couple of minutes, let's talk about what's new. Mark, I'm going to tag you in here to discuss some Gmail deletion improvements.

Mark Baquirin:

Yeah, thank you, Brandon. By the way, that was a great summary of gPanel. I love the way you described it there.

We have a new in gPanel. Currently one thing that we had before was the Gmail deletion tool. We still have it, but now it's improved and it's actually changed locations when you enter version two, which you can access up in your Settings menu.

And from there, just navigate on the left hand side to the import export sub menu and there that's where you'll find the bulk operations tool. You'll notice that we've improved the way that you can set up your search criteria. So it basically matches the way you run a search in Gmail So it's much more intuitive if you Gmail, it'll be basically the same thing.

After that, the rest is somewhat the same. You set up your search criteria. Once you've identified the emails to be deleted, you can then go ahead and run the deletion.

And that can be something of a topic that we can dive deeper into at a future Office Hours. But yeah, for this, for today, we're just going to be talking about delegation, but before I do, I'm going to pass it back to Brandon real quick.

Brandon Carter:

I just wanted to put in a quick pitch for our release notes. As always, if you go to promevo.com/releasenotes, you can sign up for a mailing list that basically, we will send you gPanel new features and improvements as soon as we post them, so you can be the first to know. And we usually try to include instructions and sometimes a little tutorial video showing you how to use those.

So I just wanted to make a quick pitch go and sign up. We, I promise we're not gonna, we're not gonna bug you too much. We only send a couple of emails per month at most.

All right, thank you for that, Mark. And Mark, just real quick, like one example of Gmail deletion. Am I correct in saying that's when maybe people in your organization start getting emails that look like they're from a top executive asking can you go buy gift cards for me or something like that?

Is that an example where, oh, that's a use case for this?

Mark Baquirin:

No, that's not just an example. That's something that we've dealt with clients often.

Identifying spam attempts in, and everybody's inboxes. I putting in your search criteria to identify those spam attempts locating them, and then the ability to just mass delete all of them from everyone's inboxes.

That's a perfect use case for this tool.

Brandon Carter:

That's great. Those are surprisingly effective. They always make me do a double take.

Mark Baquirin:

Yeah, they're getting more sophisticated.

Brandon Carter:

I do need to go to Target and buy $1,000 worth of gift cards.

All right. All right, now let's get into kind of our primary purpose here: the workshop portion.

Mark, I'm going to just turn it over to you. And can you walk us through all the things we need to know about Workspace delegation in gPanel?

Mark Baquirin:

Yeah, absolutely.

So today, our main topic, we're going to be covering delegation. What it does is it allows users to grant access to their email, calendar, and we're also going to be covering role delegation in addition to this. And they can grant access to individuals, and these individuals are known as delegates. So, these delegates can manage users emails, their calendars on the user's behalf. So that's in a nutshell what delegation is.

And we will be focusing on three different types of delegation that you can do in gPanel.

So the first one would be Gmail delegation. So what is Gmail delegation?

With Gmail delegation, the gPanel admin has the ability to grant access to any user's Gmail inbox. They can grant access to a single delegate or to a group of delegates.

These delegates will have the authority to read, send, and delete emails from the delegated user's account or inbox. However, delegates cannot change account passwords settings or engage in chat within Gmail.

The next Delegation tool we're gonna be demonstrating would be calendar delegation. And calendar delegation enables the gPanel admin to share a user's Google calendar with a delegate. The admin can control the delegate's ability to view and manage the user's calendar events, making it easier for team members or assistants to schedule meetings and appointments on the user's behalf.

And finally, we will be discussing role delegation in gPanel. So your gPanel admin can delegate roles based on specific job duties and responsibilities. Admins have the ability to limit delegation access to necessary personnel, such as admin assistants or team members who require special access to specific accounts for efficient collaboration.

Here are some example use cases that we have for each of these. And we'll just be using these as an example as we run through our demo.

So the first one will be in mail delegation. Our example will be an employee is taking an extended leave. And their manager has requested access to the employee's inbox, so they can continue corresponding on the employee's behalf.

I'm sure this has happened, um, within every organization, so this would be helpful to you, but you can see how this might help in different situations as well.

And then for calendar delegation, we're going to be using the use case an executive assistant needs access to their execs calendar to book and manage appointments on their behalf. However, they only require the ability to manage events and not sharing settings, and we'll show you how to set that up.

And then finally, we'll talk about role delegation. So a custom gPanel admin role was created to allow the HR team to run automated offboarding procedures on employees and nothing else. They don't have any other ability but to do that. The role can be delegated to team members as needed.

Alright, so those are our three scenarios, and let me pull up gPanel and show you how to set it all up.

All right. So, for those of you who are new here, this is a gPanel, this is the main screen, and this is actually our V2 version. So if you're not here already, you can click on the settings wheel that would be up here if you're in V1 and then select V2 and you will see this version.

So the main page is always our user management page. And so just as a reminder, here's our first example, we're going to be talking about mail delegation. So our employee is taking an extended leave and their manager has requested access to the employee's inbox.

So in this case, our employee is Abby Woods. So in order to set this up, you would first, from the user management page, select your employee. Once you find them, you can click on them. You can also use the search bar if it's easier for you. Just start typing in their name and they'll appear. Once you're in your user's account use this side scrolling tab to get to the Gmail settings.

And once you click on it, it'll open up the sub settings which are right here. The first one happens to be account delegation, which is what we're using today.

On this page, you'll see the ability to add a delegate here in this section. Once you add the delegate, they'll appear right down here. But before we do that, I just want to point out here's some extra information. Please read this over. If you're not able to add a delegate, make sure that you've activated account delegation, and this is a setting that you'd have to do up in your admin console.

And then there's some rules here for the limitations. So Gmail imposes limitations, and they are right here, 25 delegates and up to 10 delegators.

And here's just a quick breakdown of what the delegates can and cannot do. And just as a reminder. And then also as another reminder it, once you've set up a delegate, it can take up to 24 hours before the settings are in Gmail. However because this is our demo account, I think it'll be a lot quicker than that, but we will give it a shot.

So for Abbey Woods first of all, let me jump into my email account. And you will see here that I am only delegated to Phil and to Sam, but I don't have Abby here listed yet. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and add myself as a delegate to Abby's account.

There we go. Make sure you hit the add delegate button and there I go. I appear right here.

So going back to my Gmail. Let me refresh the page. Remember, it can take up to 24 hours, but hopefully you'll see it rather quickly.

So you can see that Abby got added here and now if I were, if I wanted to jump into Abby's account, I can click on her name, and now I am in Abby's account.

You can see that this is Abby's account up here. And this little key icon next to the profile image indicates that it's a delegated account that I'm looking at. But here I'll have the ability to read any emails, compose messages, delete any emails, and so forth. But I won't have access to settings or anything like that.

So that is how you do it. And just to point out, it's nice to be able to do this as an admin. Although, after you've enabled this email delegation settings. Your employees can perform the delegations or request delegations themselves. It's a back and forth. They'd have to send a delegation request.

The other party has to Approve it and so forth. As an admin, you bypass all that. And once you add a delegate, that delegate is there. It's actually as easy as that.

We're going to head back to our main page, which is the user management page, and jump into our second example. And our second example would be calendar delegation.

And so in this example, our exec, executive assistant will need access to the exec's calendar to book and manage appointments on their behalf, and they only need the ability to manage events but not the ability to manage sharing.

So in this particular case, I'm going to be the exec and Abby will be my assistant. So what I'd actually like to do here is jump into my calendar first.

So I would search my name, click on it and right up here, just scroll till you get to the calendar section. Here it is.

Clicking here will access all of the calendars on this user, this is my user. I have a birthday calendar, holiday calendar, I think these are just default calendars. But if there were any other secondary calendars I've created, they'd be listed here.

And then the primary calendar. The primary calendar is usually indicated by the person's email address, unless they have changed it. But that's typically it.

Your actions column here will give you the ability to change the sharing settings. This can only be done on the primary calendar. If you attempt it on any of the secondary calendars, you don't actually have the sharing setting.

And that's actually the setting where we're going to need. We're going to need access to the sharing settings. But before I do that, I'm going to go to events and I'm going to create a sample event. I could do this here on behalf of the person. It doesn't have to be me.

Let's create an event for tomorrow. We'll call it test. And we will invite our friend, Phil.

Okay, so an event was created on my calendar through gPanel. It should show up here. There it is on my actual Google calendar. Let me head back to gPanel. So we've just created an event.

And now, what I'd like to do is I'd like to actually give Abby the ability to manage that event. To do that, head over to the actions column under the primary calendar and hit share.

Before I add her, I just want to point out that the default visibility setting is right up here. So my default setting is for my entire domain to be able to see any of my events. Free or busy only.

Here are the other options if you click change.

You can set it to public, that would mean anybody, not just within your organization, but externally as well will be able to find and access your calendar and the options they'll have are either free, busy, or just a full viewer, which means they're able to see all of the event details.

We have private as the second option. So that means only people you designate will have the ability to access your calendar. And then the one that I had before, which is domain and I had free busy, which means anybody in my organization can see my, can access my calendar and see my events, but all they're going to see is free or busy. So I'm going to keep that as is.

All right, next I'm going to go ahead and add a Abby to my calendar as a delegate, you can see there's already a group here that's delegated to my calendar. So whoever's in this group has editor access that was from a previous test. I think to add Abby, all you have to do is search for their name here, hit add, and then select what kind of access you'd like to provide them.

And according to our demo here, they only need the ability to manage events, but not manage sharing. The options we have are viewer, which is just the ability to view the event; editor, which is the ability to manage the event; and then we have free busy viewer, which is the same as viewer, but they're not able to see the details, only free or busy. And then owner. And if you made them an owner, they'd have the ability to not only manage events, but also manage sharing settings, which is too much for this case, so we're gonna just leave that as editor, and hit update.

Before I update, let's jump over to Abby's actual calendar and see what she sees now. This is Abby's calendar. You can see that the event's not here, but that's because the user still has to subscribe on their own. This is not something you can do as an admin.

In order for the user to see my calendar in the first place, they can simply go to other calendars, hit the plus sign, select subscribe to calendar, and choose the person who, whose calendar you'd like to subscribe to.

And now, because it's checked, you can see that the event is right here. Because the domain default setting is free busy only, all they can see of the event is that it's busy. They don't see any event details.

Alright, I'm going to go ahead and head back to my account and my gPanel.

And the change I'd like to make is I'd like to give Abby editor access to the events on my calendar. So I've just set that up. I'm going to hit update and give it a second. All right, it's now updated. And the result should be when I head back to Abby's calendar and give it a quick refresh. You can see that she now can see the event details. She can see the event name, the time, and all of the guests who are on this event.

So that basically is how you would do a calendar delegation in gPanel.

The last thing we're going to cover is role delegation and role delegation is the ability to Delegate a role to a user. Before I get into it, we went over how to create roles in a previous Office Hours. So just head back to those videos and you can see where you can go to, to create a custom role.

And in this case, we're creating a custom role for a member of our HR team and their custom role is to have the ability to become a calendar delegate.

So to do that first, I'll show you where you go to update the roles. Once again, you start off in user management and you would choose the user whose role you're updating.

So we're going to choose Abby again, and the role is located in the general settings, which is where it starts you off and you would scroll down to the role section here. There are two role sections that you can update for every user in your organization. The first one is the cPanel role.

CPanel refers to your Google Admin console, and there are only two: admin or user. Admin would make this person a super admin, so we highly recommend that you do not give super admin access to anybody that does not require it for their job duties. We want to make sure that we only give the access that the person needs to perform their job.

So, we would ask you to keep this as user most of the time, but oftentimes there's a user who needs to perform an admin-like function and you don't want to give them those abilities in the admin console.

The solution would be to create a custom gPanel role. Once you've created the role, you can assign them the role with this second drop down menu.

Currently, Abby's role is a user that has no permissions. So she has a user role, and when we go to Abby's account, I'm going to show you what she can currently see when she logs into gPanel. So this is Abby's account. If she were with her current role, which is a user role with no permissions at all, if she were to navigate to gPanel, which would be clicking on the Google apps menu, scrolling all the way to the bottom and clicking on gPanel, the user role is a completely different portal.

And you control everything that the users can see and do. I just happen to remove everything from this role. And this is the role she's assigned. So she can see only her profile information. She has no ability to edit anything because that's how I've set it. You can see all of those functions are grayed out. So, this is her current view of things.

What I'd like to do is head back to gPanel and I'm going to update this to a limited admin role. And this admin role will be, as we discussed, the calendar admin. So I've selected calendar admin and, after you select it, you do have to scroll to the top and hit save. Please don't skip that step.

So now you can see, Abby is now logged into gPanel in the admin portal, but you can see that her controls to the side are reduced. She only has the controls I've provided her, which are calendar only controls. So she has the ability to go into calendars. Oh, actually, she can go into any person here.

Let me look up myself because I know I do have calendar events. So she can go into my account. And all she has access to is calendars and not Gmail, contacts, and everything else that was here with a full admin settings. So she clicks on my calendars, she'll see the same view, and she'll have the ability to edit those settings as well.

So that's, um, a quick demo on how you can, uh, assign a custom gPanel role and how to use it. That is the first place to do it. The second place for assigning roles would be under administration, role manager. And here you have access to all of your roles.

And in our previous Office Hours, we showed you how to create these custom roles. This is our calendar admin role that we were in. I'm going to go ahead and edit it. You can see, these are the permissions. They just have a few, not, but you can see just how many permissions there are. And they have all the calendar permissions and none of the other permissions.

If you head to the member section, this is another place. And this is probably the faster way if you're going to be bulk adding or bulk assigning this role to people. It's faster to do it from here, from role manager members, because you can very quickly look up a user add them on, hit the plus sign, and assign them that role. And that's another way to do it. Also you can delete in the same fashion.

That kind of wraps up our discussion for today. So that we've gone over Gmail delegation, calendar delegation, and role delegation. And right now if you had any questions i'd love to address those.

Brandon Carter:

We have a bit of a quiet crowd.

So but we do have some questions that we're going to address. So for those of you that are here, don't be shy Drop any questions that you have into the comments.

Mark, thank you for that. That's that's super useful. Super helpful.

Some of the questions that, that we had or that I have specifically. One, if a delegated. action is taken, sorry, if an action is taken by someone that like a calendar has been delegated to, is that reflected?

So if I delegate my calendar or Gmail to a person on my team and they maybe create an event for me, or they send an email are they sending that email as me? Or is it reflected that, hey, this is employee X on behalf of Brandon?

Mark Baquirin:

That's a great question. I believe the default setting is It will say the email was sent to you on behalf of, however, you can turn that off in your admin console.

I would have to search for the setting, but let me let me see if I can find that real quick. And if you want to tee up the next question, I believe it's somewhere. It's been a while since I've gone to that setting, but very important.

You can definitely turn that off. And so when you turn it off, what's what would happen is basically when you send an email on behalf of somebody else, it will only show their name and not on behalf of.

Brandon Carter:

It'll appear as if it's coming directly from that employee with no indication that it could be a delegate, right?

Mark Baquirin:

That is correct.

In the Gmail settings under user settings. And then head down to mail delegation. And then you'll have this option here. Show the account owner and the delegate who sent the mail. Or simply show the account owner only. And that's probably the preferred one if you want to be a little bit different more incognito about it.

Brandon Carter:

Fantastic, next question can delegation be set up and removed like as part of a policy or part of a like scheduled automation within gPanel?

Mark Baquirin:

I believe so, but let me double check It would be under automations policies and let's add a policy and see what we have here As our options. I thought there was that option. Not under regular policies, but where it does appear would be, oh, I guess that makes more sense. It would be under your decom policies.

It's one of the actions that you can set up on your decom policy would be under the Gmail section. And it would be add delegate, right here.

So you can set this up so that as you trigger your DCOM automation one of the things you can do is add a a delegate perhaps the employee's manager or the HR team to their inbox until all of your DCOM actions have been triggered. It's just a good way to have other people keep an eye on things while the person is being decommissioned.

Brandon Carter:

Gotcha.

Last question. And this is just me not knowing how all of this works but can I set my own delegate as an individual user? Or does this this is an admin control function?

Mark Baquirin:

No once the delegation setting is allowed in your Google admin console, it allows users to request to be a delegate from another user. But that process means that the source user would send a request and then that recipient would receive the request and need to approve it.

And so it's just like a back and forth exchange. But if you do it through gPanel you bypass all of that with with our API's and it's just automatic. Once you add the delegate, they are added and no further questions are needed.

Brandon Carter:

That's terrific.

Cool. That's all the questions. I appreciate everyone being here asking questions. Thank you for answering those, Mark. I'm going to pop our presentation back up on the screen. So just a couple of quick housekeeping reminders.

Once again, you can sign up for gPanel release notes. Sometimes we call it a newsletter by going to promevo.com/gpanel-newsletter. And of course you can sign up for the Office Hours on an individual basis or sign up for the entire series by going to promevo.com/webinars.

And as always, if you aren't into gPanel yet and are curious about it, go to promevo.com/gpanel. You can see videos, you can see demos on it. Learn more about the functions.

Yeah, but that's it for today. Thank you to everyone for being here, Mark, as always. Thank you for walking us through this.

Mark Baquirin:

My pleasure.

Brandon Carter:

Appreciate it. It's hard to do live demos and you do a great job with them.

Um, and you know, you can tell that like you care about it, you know, the tool. So, uh, appreciate it. And with that said, we will see you at the next one.

Mark Baquirin:

Thanks so much.

Brandon Carter:

Bye now.